Card doctoring debacle

[benjulmag]

Originally Posted by drcy

Documentation of provenance isn't fool proof, and can be forged and faked (Everyone knows many fakes and reprint on eBay come fish stories), and is used in conjunction with, or as supporting evidence of, the physical examination. Good provenance and physical examination support each other.

Sometimes provenance shows that an item has been around for a long time, which is in and of itself helpful information. Obviously, at the least rules it out as a recent creation.

This to me is the key thing I look to in regard to provenance. The crux of my collection is 19th century. Very few of those items have provenance that take the item back to its point of inception. But if I can go far enough back in time to a point when there would have been no financial incentive to manufacture a counterfeit, I would feel the item is real. Of course accompanying this would be visual examination, though that is a negative test -- it can show something is fake but in and of itself it cannot establish something is real.

A favorite tactic of counterfeiters is, after having created the fake, to induce a prestigious museum to display it for a period of time. If one is selling, say, a Ruth item, it makes for a great story to say the item comes directly from the Babe Ruth museum. But unless one knows the history of how the museum got it and its prior provenance, having been on display at the museum in and of itself means essentially nothing.

To the point that provenance can be faked, that is absolutely correct. There have also been instances where fake items came directly from the descendants of former players. Often they would "seed" the fake in with genuine items in order to induce a prospective purchaser to lower his/her guard. Or the seeding would be done not by the family but by the person who bought genuine items from the family.

Bottom line -- there is a lot of great genuine stuff out there to enjoy, but as the prices of really good stuff continue to rise, one must be more and more careful in deciding whether the item is real.

I think it might have been Jay Miller who used the term "suspended disbelief" to characterize the mind set of a person who sees an opportunity to purchase his/her dream item. The person so badly wants the item to be real that he/she loses his/her ability to objectively evaluate it.